World Of Waste: America's Mass Consumption In Images

Look at this image.

Chris Jordan

Pan out . . .

Chris Jordan

Pan out a little more . . .

Chris Jordan, Plastic Bottles, 2007, 60x120"

That right there is 2,000,000 plastic bottles, the number of plastic bottles Americans throw out every five minutes.

Welcome to the work of Chris Jordan, a Seattle-based photographer and environmental advocate. Jordan takes beautiful photographs of waste. His hope: to disgust us into change.

Look at this one, a 7-foot long image of 60,000 plastic bags. That's the number of plastic bags we use in the U.S. . . . every five seconds. Are you disgusted yet?

Chris Jordan. Plastic Bags, 2007, 60" x 72"

Disappointingly, the jpegs on your computer screen can barely do justice to Jordan's massive, high resolution photographs, most of which take up entire walls in galleries. Each image illustrates a grouping of America's waste. But, as Jordan so often prefaces, capturing dissipation in a single photograph is impossible. The true scale of our mass consumption's accumulation is invisible. Its magnitude is undetectable as it is spread throughout garbage dumps, storage units and landfills from Fort Wadsworth, Staten Island to a fermenting heap in Kenya.

Given the disconnect, Jordan uses "computer shenanigans" or PhotoShop to illustrate the true scale of our nation's waste. He starts out with a single image, multiplying it over and over and over again to reach the statistic of our consumption. This image, for example, represents the number of cell phones America discards every few minutes.

Chris Jordan

A few hours go by. We discard more cell phones. The heap grows larger.

Chris Jordan

A day goes by. 426,000 cell phones discarded in total.

Chris Jordan

To explain the shocking magnitude of our waste, Jordan has also released a video installation, "Intolerable Beauty and Running the Numbers." The video premiered at Ingeo Natureworks Creative Gallery in New York on Earth Day (Aprill 22nd) and will travel around the world in conjunction with Ingeo Earth Month ending on World Environment Day (June 5th). You can catch Jordan's video as it travels with Ingeo's Earth Month exhibit (popular stop off points include Paris and Tokyo) or you can find the film on Jordan's website.

I encourage you to watch this film. It is mind-blowing and depressing, but also inspiring. As Jordan says in his own words, "it may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake."

Comments

[dgscol]

I thought I saw a woman's breast.

[Badbone]

I think the enormity actually has the opposite affect on me than the artist was intending. To misquote Stalin, "A single bottle is a tragedy, a million bottles is a statistic."

[onedb4u]

If this "stuff" bothers you, and it should, you ought to visit this website.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Makes you think ...

[PlanetKansas]

How about a photo collage of all the hi-tech equipment we throw away? How many of us are willing to give up our televisions, I-Pods, computers and gadgets when they frizz out after their 3-year life span or are replaced by something newer and more fashionable?

There is too much profit in creating a disposable society and very few things are manufactured today that are meant to be repaired, maintained and even passed onto the next generation. The economy and jobs depend on it.

Plastic bags and water bottles is just a microcosm of all the waste we produce.

[ugmold]

Don't have a cell phone, don't buy beverages in plastic bottles....no guilt here

[Trueheart]

Somehow I knew I wouldn't want to know, but clicked on the picture anyway. I was right.

[dora_rice]

shocking, these pictures say more than a book.

[enilorac]

These photographs are Art, yes, and they show the ultimate of garbage/waste as garbage/waste Sublime. In the case of Art vs. Life, as always, Life wins out , or let's say the ghastly reality wins out as being the most experientially awful --- if it is awful. But Art allows us to contemplate the unfathomable, the un-comprehensible and what we, if we are Huffpo readers, is probably a realm we can only imagine, read about or experience through Art or journalism.
So what, that Chris Jordan's photographs are digital expressions and not capturing the real.
If you want the real, go out to dumps, visit the third world countries that have been in many places ruined by inadequate garbage managment, while the big box stores move in. Or sign up to join the troops in Iraq and experience what they do, so we can live with Crapola (isn't Freedom another word for Crapola for all, these days). K-Mart is in India( just getting there), in Mexico all over Europe. The Crapola is almost everywhere now and unless we cut the Crapola, the world will surely end with environmental degradation, after a never ending cycle of wars to do with oil for vehicles, plastic stuff and even fertilizer, until it all runs out. So take your own cup and Swiss army knife to the picnic, drive less, bike more, eat vegan a lot, practice birth control, refuse plastic bags and so on and so on.

[newworldman777]

You are spot on with your observations regarding the increasing wastefulness of humanity. Your encouragement for people to take on the personal responsibility to use less, and indeed "reuse" when we can, in order to reduce waste is never going to work. Most people simply will not assume such responsibility, when no incentives exist for them to do so. We need governmental regulation requiring us to do so. Where is the leadership on this troubling issue? I have advocated for years that all of our containers should be returnable or reusable. We had a smidgeon of that years ago, with the returnable "pop" bottles, and the jelly jars that could double as drinking glasses. Pure genius. But that disappeared, and now we are on a fast track to quickly filling our landfills by overproducing. Disposable diapers are one of the largest culprits. Whatever happened to cloth diapers? If one is too busy to wash cloth diapers, then perhaps one is too busy to have children in the first place. Too many people, not enough leadership, too much laziness, too much apathy, too much idocy in the world to make much of a difference at this stage. I'm just glad that I had no children to leave this mess to.

[deckard70]

"Pan" means to move laterally. You mean "zoom".

[satx218]

Yep, on-shore sucks.

Off-shore, here's another super entrepreneurial opportunity:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=512424&in_page_id=1811

suck it all up, recycle it.

[Cathexis]

A powerful reminder of the impact we have on our environment. It is easy to trivialize and ignore the effects we have, as single individuals. But it's past time we started realizing we are not alone in this world and we do not have the right to live as if we were.

[cktirumalai]

Chris Jordan has moved on a long way from Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, which decades ago may have conveyed innocent ordinariness, when environmental questions were just at the thershold of the nation's consciousness.

[SevereTireDamage]

That's a gold mine for some entrepreneurial plastics recycler.

So these aren't actual photographs, they're digital compositions. They "represent" our overconsumption. (Frankly, I was expecting some kind of photomosaic.) I think that decreases their message.

This kind of propaganda is easily created to argue pretty much anything. We have six billion people on the planet; what's the total volume of urine excreted in a 24-hour period? Now think of the, um, "representation" one could create of this, what, billion and a half gallons of urine (assuming a quart per day per person)? How many tanker trucks would that be? How many "olympic-sized swimming pools"?

How about a "representation" of the amount of blood donated by Americans in a 24-hour period? That would be considerably less alarmist, but perhaps more ennobling.

And ultimately, So What? We're a lot of people. We make a lot of shit, we consume a lot of shit, we throw away a lot of shit. Even a small fraction of 300,000,000 people is a crowd. Crowd shots are easy.

[SeriousBlack]

Part 2:

Only now we have the same scenario being played out on a global scale. If it weren't for the fact that most people are as blind to the problems as you are, I might be optimistic about the long-term future of the human race. Oh well - maybe that's why we haven't heard any other advanced civilizations broadcasting messages from interstellar space; it appears that it only takes a few hundred years of industrial development for all "advanced" civilizations to destroy their planets' ecosystem by overpopulation and pollution.

On the microscopic chance that you want to open your mind even a little bit (I won't hold my breath):

http://www.eco-pros.com/humanimpact.htm

"We make a lot of shit, we consume a lot of shit, we throw away a lot of shit." "So what."

So, I can't believe I share this beautiful planet with people as stupid as you are. That's what.

And next time ask me how I REALLY feel.

[SeriousBlack]

You're so blind.

Even one of your supposed "so what" examples, the "amount of urine excreted in a 24-hour period", relates to the more serious problem of solid human waste that serves to illustrate exactly the opposite of what you are trying to assert.

Satellite photos from space show human sewage from the 6.6 billion human beings already here (projected to grow to 9 billion by 2050) streaming into the oceans, joining all the other industrial pollution, pesticides and trash in destroying the oceans of this planet and their inhabitants (in conjunction with overfishing). There are now two huge "Pacific Garbage Patch" areas the size of continents, filled with floating plastic waste.

Head-in-the-sand attitudes like yours are shockingly selfish and ignorant and demonstrate an incredible lack of self-awareness or concern for the effects that you have individually on the planet and your imbecilic and simplistic projection of your mentality to the level of the entire human race.

It was people like you who cheerfully went about their way oblivious to the problems of overpopulation and cutting down all the trees on Easter Island to roll big stone statues to their mounting places, while people with the ability to think rationally tried to convince them that the degradation of the environment of Easter Island was eventually going to kill them all.

[JScott]

Well ya can't blame me for much of it, I rarely if ever use a plastic soda bottle and I don't have a cellphone.